Aircraft owners and operators maintain a variety of log books related to the use, operation and maintenance of aircraft and aircraft engines, systems and components. Such log books are maintained for numerous reasons and in numerous formats. For example, aircraft owners and operators keep track of the time that aircraft are operated in flight to track crew time. Crew time logging may be necessary (depending on the type of aircraft and purpose for which the aircraft is used) for safety reasons, to meet regulatory requirements, for labor and employment practices, to meet contract requirements, and for other reasons. Similarly, aircraft owners and operators may separately keep track of each occasion upon which an individual engine is started and how it is used. Such engine logging might include numerous parameters, such as length of time operated, temperatures at various points within an engine, fuel consumption, etc., and such information might further be used for a variety of purposes including safety analysis, contract or warranty documentation, business metrics, and others. The formats currently used to maintain the various logs for various purposes also vary widely, from manual entries on paper records to electronic records in differing formats, and sometimes vary even on the same aircraft. On some occasions, there are multiple records of the same event for the same aircraft, based on differing definitions for differing purposes. For example, the definition of “flight time” required to be used by one government agency for the purposes of crew scheduling may differ from a definition of “flight time” from a different government agency for the purposes of contract payment, even for the same flight on the same aircraft. In short, aircraft event logging is complex, multi-faceted and would benefit from coherent, accurate systemization.
There are a few services for keeping track of aircraft log books in use in the industry today. The majority require manual data entry at some point, even those that are not entirely manual paper records. Many systems require multiple people to maintain updates and enter the information in order to obtain a complete record of all desired data for a single flight. This may require extensive labor, and injects the possibility of human error in the recordings.
Previous systems to address this issue have utilized commonly used calculations to display the data accurately. This includes, but is not limited to, departure time, arrival time, cycles performed by various systems associated with the airplane (for example, the number of times landing gear is raised or lowered, the number of times an individual engine is started, or the number of times a pressurized aircraft hull is subjected to pressurization), and landings. In such a service, customers are provided an online subsystem to enter this information on their aircraft. The subsystem may be customized to a customer's needs, or not, and typically requires a subscription fee to operate.
An example of a prior art system is Rockwell Collins Ascend Flight Operations System (FOS®). A limitation with the Rockwell Collins service is the data has to be manually entered into the system. The information from the aircraft is retrieved or calculated manually at a ground station, processed, and configured to be viewed by the user. Such systems are inherently subject to human error in retrieving and recording accurate information for later input into the logging system, and may also suffer time delays from the recorded event to the time of logging, particularly when aircraft are operated far afield from robust support systems.
An automated reporting subsystem with accurate and real-time logs of aircraft reportable events that collect data from onboard aircraft systems and components anywhere in the world, which then transmits and collates that data using an Internet connection established through satellite communication, ground-based cellular network connections, or UHF/VHF/HF radio transmissions (alone or in combination) solves both the problems of human error and timeliness in reporting. The automated reporting subsystem may then transmit data that is collected and logged to one or more recipients, such as aircraft owners, operators, flight operations centers, maintenance organizations, regulatory agencies, and government agencies depending on the nature of the data and the needs of the aircraft owners or operators.